Security has to be one of the top priorities for anyone who considers buying a car. But the news about cars lately was related to driving fast than with driving safely. Only five cars in the market boasts of great crash-test scores, but 14 cars in the market have top speed of 202 kms / hr or higher. Constructing safe cars instead of showy cars, would be a much poor option to make business sense.
As if the high assist the mutual individuality of fun and safety, sports cars do not enter the list of the safest cars in the market. All the top five cars in the list are sedans, made by Ford Motor’s (NYSE: F – news – people) Crown Victoria, a vehicle often construct as a taxi and close in strength to a hearse, and two other dead weights resulting from it, Mercury’s Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car.
The safest cars do not even appeal to a common buyer, and automakers seem to have no instant plans to launch more of them in the market. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) crash-test scores for 2006-model cars (the model year is underway) have shown five cars with great marks. During the year 2005,the model cars were the same five cars from 2006, the only one in 2005 to give a great score.
Completely predictable that there is a Volvo, the S80 sedan, which is a part of the five safest cars? But one may wonder why Volvo is the only carmaker that clients naturally link with certainty, despite the hard work of Honda Motor (NYSE: HMC – news – people) and DaimlerChrysler’s (NYSE: dcx – news – people) Mercedes- Benz to popularize heavily their cars’ security features.
Two years ago, Volvo invited journalists to take a tour of its Car Safety Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden. The program had a crash-test expression – a simulation of what happens when a driver runs on a red light and strikes the car right away. A Volvo XC90 SUV, going 30 mph, stopped near the driver’s door of a Volvo S40 sedan as it rolled onward at 15 mph. After sometime, reporters rushed up to the spot. The airbags were sweltering and the XC90 interior stammered the horrific smell of an electrical fire.
But Volvo executives claimed that someone had been in the S40, which is secluded by side airbags and curtains, he or she might have seen bruises or a busted rib to think the worst, but perhaps would not have been hospitalized. From that time the menace of building cars with below average security is clearly known to the observers.
There are plenty of opportunities for automobile companies, other than Volvo, to consider safety as a top selling point. But only a few are responsible. Four of the five cars in the list were created by Ford and its subsidiaries; one is a Honda, from its luxury Acura division, incorporated in this list.
All vehicles hired got the highest rating (five stars) in each crash-test group. The cars included were the NHTSA tested in each of the available method: two frontal-impact tests, two side-impact tests and a rollover confrontation test. To be fair, the list is partly accredited to the fact that NHTSA does not conduct crash-test for all cars in the market, nor does it involve each car through each test it holds.
